There are two types of hard disk formatting possibilities, low and high level formating. High level formatting is the widely known formatting that erases data on the disks while low level formatting nowadays refers to the reinitialization to the factory settings. One of the major differences between both types is that data can successfully be restored after performing a high level formatting of a hard drive.
This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.
The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.
I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.
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Low level format is total overkill for secure erasing of data. It is not needed for this (mentioned programs for erasing do just fine) and could (if used repeatedly WILL) damage HDD.
It is really used for repairing drives and actually requires person with knowledge of what it can and what can’t fix.
got hdd that crashed,will trying this program help to sort it out?have tried normal formatting but hasn’t worked.
Rarst – “Low level format is total overkill for secure erasing of data”
No its not, if you dont do a low level format or destroy the drive physically most of your data is still there. You dont want to sell a drive on ebay with private info on the drive.
I have used this program and it failed to format my 320 GB Seagate Hard disk.
The program runs for an hour long but and gave a hard disk format confirmation as well but I can still see the partitions and even the data as well.
HAHA…. This program do not works at all.
Tried to use it did recognise any hard drives. Limited user functionality.
Sorry DIDN’T Recognise any drives
My Toshiba HDD of notebook is formatted and it is detected only in BIOS, can not be used as slave HDD, if used primary HDD won’t boot. Any solution mail me at: krishna.net.np@gmail.com
DONT DO THAT !!!!!!
The electrostatic shock is possible that may cause damage the HDD as it did for my 200 Gig MAXTOR HDD and it fucked off.
i want to do Low level format give me step how would I do that?
To do low level format and to completely wipe out HDD data. Use the format software from http://www.killdisk.com, download the CD ISO image , burn to CD, ad boot from CD , the rest can be found in the menu..
Dave, you must repartition your hdd to see the partitions (make sense??) Mahesh get @active killdisk.
To do low level format and to completely wipe out HDD data. Use the format software from http://www.killdisk.com, download the CD ISO image , burn to CD, ad boot from CD , the rest can be found in the menu..
A low level format is used to repair bad sectors from a drive and to clear it back to factory default, if you are experiencing issues with your drive freezing, crashing or losing sectors randomly then a low level format is a warranted course of action but if you are just trying to get rid of data you dont want others to see or to be able to recover then using other programs that can run during normal windows/linux/unix operation can be downloaded from several sites on the internet. With that being said if you are needing to perform a low level format then please see your drive manufacturers site for the appropriate tools due to the possibility of damaging your drive while using a third party program.
I think that low level formatting is a last way to recover from bad sectors.but this process will harmful for your system so,may be don’t use low level formatting.
do not use this